A drab Spring.

                                                                   War is never Civil

Arab Spring

It may be only February, but out here in California the spring has sprung, and it's  glorious ... and frightening. If one were to look at the state of the State's water supplies as of this time last year, it gave one reason to be optimistic about the fire season as there was no part of it in serious drought. You would , however have been wrong to assume that meant that we would have a better outcome than the year before, as instead it was the worst, by far, than any other preceding year in recorded history. This spring, as the ground has already begun to dry from intense insolation, the picture is indeed grim. Much of the State is red, meaning it is way dry, and some of it seriously so, even as but a pittance of moisture is forecast for the foreseeable future.

Right now, though, the sight in the back yard is one of growth and vigor, the birds are chirping as they go about their chores of building nests, gathering twigs and bits here and there and weaving them into repositories for their offspring, it lends an air of hopefulness to the gloom of Life in the Time of Corona. But as the polar vortex sweeps down out of the Arctic enveloping the Midwest in an icy blanket, the cooling effect of El Nina comes to mind, in this, the year that followed the 3'rd hottest year in history despite the coolness. What also has me wondering is the escape of all that frigid air a mere month before the spring solstice. Doesn't that mean that as the sun starts shining in the far north, there will be less cold air up there to keep its ice frozen over the summer season?  

That would make Rosneft happy, as they are at the forefront of the push to exploit the Arctic's trove of natural resources, damn the consequences, as they believe in their fervid imaginations that Russia, since its vast plains will be warmed in the changed climate (is already being warmed by the already changed climate), its forests burned to a cinder enabling planting without the necessity of having to first clear, a la Brazil and Indochina, all those pesky rainforests to make a few billionaires happy by planting sugarcane to make "biofuel" (biofuel is for biological entities: mammals and birds, for example; using food crops (all food crops are biofuel: it is only when enormous amounts of exogenous energy, supplied by burning fossil fuels, are used to process them are they transformed into machine fuel) to manufacture machine fuels doesn't magically transform machines into biological entities: fuel from foodcrops is using biofuels to actuate machine combustion, robbing the biological world of sustenance to power the ongoing domination and destruction of anything left of the natural world by mechanical means: it relies on not only the combustion of the rainforests themselves, but of the fuel derived therefrom in order to power ICE machines, which are the only machines it is manufactured to fuel. The use of so-called biofuels prolongs the utilization of the internal combustion engine, not curtails it, as the Green meanies would have you believe).

Of course Rosneft isn't alone in their despoliation of nature. Together with Russia, the USA is a major fracking state, a petro power by dint of the extraordinary measures it is willing to take in order to make a few oligarchs rich and keep its citizens zipping around in their magical car pets. But the USA is a Democracy and must therefore make up elaborate lies to get its populace to ignore the ramifications of their increasingly power-hungry existence, one in which denial plays the central role. Thus do we see the main divide between the two camps of denialists: those who believe the eco-nonsense that turning food crops into combustible material to power machines is a "green" solution, so as to enable them to keep driving guilt-free, and those who pretend to believe that there is no such thing as climate change, despite it having already taken place right in front of their eyes, so that they can drive guilt-free.

As the two camps of denialists get further divided, with neither recognizing the absurdity of their own position, while ridiculing that of their antagonists, we increasingly hear talk of civil war being inevitable, and in fact, desirable, and now being cheerled as "Taking back the country" by the failed loser, our ex-45'th president. Yet what we never hear mentioned, even by those who are dead-set against the Furor's rabble-rousing rhetoric, are the civil wars spawned by the Arab Spring with citizens screaming the same demands for a nebulous "Freedom". Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Ukraine, and prior to that, Afghanistan and Iraq, or any of the other nations into which the USA has ploughed trillions of dollars to keep their civil wars active and bloody are now, ten, and twenty years later, smoking ruins with nary a one even pretending any longer that they are now democratic countries. Civil War has left them, each and every one, bastions of despair. Never do the US leaders point to these countries to which we, as citizens, who are never consulted as to the deployment of the armies we are answerable for, have been forced to send our soldiers, contractors, life's blood and treasure, bother to bring to our attention the total depravity and utter privation that these so-called civil wars, all fought with outsider monies supplied by Democratic governments, from entities as uncivil as can be imagined, left in their wake. Never do we hear our politicians decry what happens when countries descend into Civil War, not even while the failed ex-45'th President maliciously incites it in his own country, not even while the famously failed Furor is on trial for using his position of Power to foment uncivil unrest. 

Photos of emaciated grey whales swimming away from their feeding spots in the Arctic toward their breeding grounds in Baja, California emphasize the repercussions in Nature of mankind's relentless growth in its consumption of energy. The pictures from these war-ravaged countries should be telling us the same story, that their future is our future, one that demagogues like the lard-ass from the thighs of Mar-a Largo will be more than happy to steer us toward, with him watching the debacle on TV, stuffing his smug face with Doritos while we tear each other's to pieces for his amusement; just another chapter in his game of thrown elections.

So let's never mind the empty phrase of Speaking truth to power. What we need far more than that is to start speaking the truth about Power, and what that truth suggests as to how we should be planning our environment and its infrastructure for the future. Because the way we're currently behaving isn't going to end in anything but grief. Should you doubt this, I invite you to look back over the past year, the one in which you witnessed the way mankind handled the corona virus. Compared to how we are handling the Climate crisis, it was a sterling performance. No exaggeration. Yet it is the climate crisis that is far more dire, its ramifications reaching farther into the future, one that has already shown signs of providing us lives of unending privation and dread. Privation Enterprise ... Das Capitalism of the future.